


Girl Without Hands

by ohhtheperiphery



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: ....weird sex dreams, F/M, a better use of an iron throne, internal monologues that don't STOP, obnoxiously retelling scenes from different POVs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-06
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-28 13:49:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/992692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohhtheperiphery/pseuds/ohhtheperiphery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She had not thought they could tear him down, had not thought there was space for such nothingness inside of him, too. But they have carved from him a lack, have hollowed something out from his insides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Girl Without Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Mentions of Cersei/Robert & Cersei/Lancel
> 
> WARNINGS include...the fact that Robert Baratheon exists, mostly, which is to say some very briefly implied/mentioned **non-consensual sex**.
> 
> Title [reference](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nyX20K_Whs)!

She's had the idea in her mind for some time now, buzzing around like the hum of insects on late autumn nights, clattering their death-rattle wings into the firelight as bright as the dying sun. Men always take the things they want like it's nothing, maybe because it is.

"The taking, or the object?" Tyrion asks. The sound of his voice disturbs her. Her wine glass clinks against another as she tilts it, watching the Arbor gold sloshing around its insides. She hadn't realized she was speaking out loud.

"Either," Cersei says. "Both." Her little brother frowns, brow furrowed and eyes locked blurrily on his own near-drained glass. "Leave," she amends, and he blinks up at her for a moment, but then he does what he's told without so much as a second glance.

She wants Jaime back the way she wants to throw her empty glass at the uproar of insects screeching like a mob outside her window. Smash their tiny bodies to pieces, relish in the silence -- sweet and sickening -- that would fall in their wake.

Lancel thrusts dutifully like a dog. Above his head, she stares at the canopy and remembers Robert's grunts, deeper than her cousin's but no less enthused. They don't lack for _enthusiasm_ , those men who take what they want, she thinks, languidly. Lancel's hand is in her hair, at the side of her face. When she twists beneath him and says, "Yes, please," it's exactly like squashing a bug between her fingers. He barely has time to pull out from between her legs before his seed is spilling on her skin.

The fabric of the canopy is a brown so dark it's nearly black, with some design interwoven through it, intricate and detailed gold. Is the pattern meant to be a stag? A strangled stag, maybe, tangled in his own antlers. Robert died under this canopy. _Yes, please_ , she thinks, hand between her thighs, Lancel oblivious and already asleep besides her. The sound of the insipid creatures throwing themselves to their own deaths in the flames of the torches burning outside arches like some terrible audible beast on the back of her mind. Her voice is breathless and stuck in the back of her throat. She comes on a wave of nothing, caught between her own fingers.

She dreams. Lately it's all been dreams of her twin, or someone who looks like him. She always thinks it's Jaime, but when she turns his shoulder, it's her own reflection staring back. Strange, to spot the difference, but it's there.

 _The lioness is the one who hunts for her pride_. Her lady mother told her that, once. Cersei cannot remember the Lady Joanna's face; she is only shadows and smoke and molten gold, untouchable as the sun, or the shadows it casts. She is the smoldering drought that the northmen forget to fear. _Winter is coming_ , but summer in the desert is just as deadly. Joanna Lannister could have told them that, were she not a specter made of dust and disappointment.

All the same, Cersei imagines she had a smile made of blood, the one all true women learn to wear.

Blood that seeps up into the eyes. The eyes of a huntress, of that lioness that must provide for her pack. That's what Cersei sees, in the dreams, when she turns the shoulder of a shadow and it's her own face staring back. It's the eyes that give it away -- green and glinting like the great beast in the dark, on the prowl. Her brother has always had a fight under his skin, but he's never had claws in his eyes.

In the dream she fucks herself until the other cries out, until their bodies are one, inseparable, the same thundering blood and flesh. By the end there are no bruises because there is no skin, there is no separation; there is only the fucking, the space where two flesh have become one.

She wakes in the dark, alone and shivering, the night air cold on her skin. She feels panic pumping blood through her veins. Like a frightened child, she hears rats in every corner, sees shadows shifting in the dark. She swallows the fear down, closes her eyes, and wills herself back to sleep.

Every day the sun rises; every day she faces the world with a new set of ice settling in her veins, in the panic's stead. Winter is coming, after all, to the savannah, and the secret to survival is to freeze when required and thaw on command.

The little She-Wolf has that trick down perfectly. She has no brother here to rage impotently about the bruises that she wears, and she is often good at hiding her tears. Cersei wonders if she cries on the night of her wedding. She cannot imagine Sansa Stark with her legs spread and Tyrion's twisted little body pumping between them.

She wonders how old Myrcella will be, when some man spreads her. Divination, sadly, is not to be found at the bottom of a wine cup, but no one ever blamed a Lannister for lack of persistence.

Tonight she dreams she sits the Iron Throne -- it's nothing _new_ , she's had the same dream since her husband sat it. She could have snapped his neck, his fleshy, disgusting neck, hidden beneath his beard. And he himself hidden behind a terrible cowardice; even now she wishes she could rip skin from body like the boar that finally tore him open. If she'd ripped off his cock would they have still let him sit it, him and Ned Stark and her father and Tyrion, even, half a man though he was? An endless distinguished line of cocks to sit the barbed seat of Seven Kingdoms. Not her, never her; though she is Regent, endlessly she _wants_. That's what she gets -- a desire that men take for granted and at will, then throw back chewed like a bone at her feet.

In this dream it's her twin kneeling before her. The throne is cool beneath her fingers, the thing that is hers in her son's name, in her late husband's ever-reaching, strangling grasp. Jaime's eyes are glinted with lust, not of the blood kind. She digs her fingers through his hair, drawing his lips down on her. His kisses are warm, against her thighs, on her sex; his tongue moves in slow, familiar motions. Below them is the crowd, and the crowd _sees_ , the crowd _knows_ , and if she looks she'll see their faces staring back at her -- her father, and Ned Stark, and Robert, and all the rest. Would they care for what they saw? Jaime, the self outside her body, beneath her, panting hot breaths against her thighs, his mouth full of the taste of her and his fingers wet on her cunt?

She grabs Jaime's head with both hands, holding him in place. The spikes of the throne cut into her back, and the blood should be warm -- red washing over them -- but she feels nothing except for her twin, his tongue and his fingers, finding the place that makes the world shudder, oscillate between light and dark. She is thrown into the light like a moth to the flame, until she shudders and collapses, tossed back over into the head-splitting darkness once again, falling, falling, endless.

It is a long way down, from somewhere as high as this.

Joffrey is dead the way Joanna is; the memory is in the _smell_. On her knees in the sept, she is eight with tears on her face, trying to make sense of the new lack, like it's a visceral wound taking residence in her belly. In that sept in the depths of Casterly Rock, Jaime alone is besides her. She doesn't know if it's his tears on her face or still her own, but it is his tongue in her mouth; she memorizes the taste of him, shudders at all the places where their flesh touches and where it doesn't. _A kiss_ , she names it, perhaps for the first time -- _we're kissing_. It had made Mother so _angry_ , the kissing and the other touches, those plays at being close, at feeling good. Mother says nothing of it now, her body white and still and silent.

Cersei did not feel good, that night of their mother's death. But Jaime between her lips and teeth had made her feel _something_ , all the same, something other than drifting-falling numb. Or maybe something exactly the same as drifting-falling numb; maybe it was that feeling that she was trying to recreate, to achieve again for years and years to come.

Joffrey's bier has that same sickly sweet smell of the freshly dead. The flesh between her palms is dream-dust dry, and this time her eyes are dry, as well. The longer she stares into the white-hot flicker of the candles, the less real the sept, the world, _herself_ , feels. She is slipping into some long dream state, and the sound of someone entering behind her is lost in it, in an echo of a thought.

She turns and doesn't recognize him.

His face comes to her like a voice calling out of a tunnel. "Jaime?" Her own voice sounds distant in her ears. Everything is distilled, disturbed, like she's walking through the motions of a ghost, like her body has finally been taken from her, too. It belongs to him, now; to Jaime or to Joffrey or to someone, anyone other than herself.

When he shoves his stump in her face, it barely even registers.

 _It's only fair_ , she thinks, delayed, after he has smashed aside the candles and he's inside her. Just as she has lost her flesh and blood, he has his. What is a mother without her son, a knight without his hand?

What is a mirror without a reflection?

It all sounds too much like riddles, like the sort of things that used to amuse Tyrion, when they were all young at the Rock together. _A mother's child, a father's child, but no one's son. Who am I?_ He'd asked, once, thinking himself clever.

The answer, she knew, was _unlucky_.

The things spilling from her lips now have nothing to do with daughters and their unfortunate lots. She whispers Jaime's name and lets him have his take of her. There is no game here, there is only homecoming; there is only blood and warmth and her son's body rotting as a man resembling her twin fucks her on an altar and she trembles underneath him, shuddering at every thrust.

The Stranger protect them both, for surely not the Mother nor any of the others will watch over them now.

She used to tie him to the bed post -- both hands, not just the one -- and _she_ would fuck _him_. It was his cock buried inside her, yes, her body filled by him. She was the one with the _lack_ , the space left when he was gone. But it was Jaime's body stretched beneath hers; _he_ could watch the canopy, could see the patterns in gold and black that she memorized like ugly constellations while her royal husband was atop her. She had hands but what good did hands do you with the weight of a man more than twice your size bearing you down?

She imagines Jaime felt something, those nights, something noble and chivalrous about being in her place, an inverted sort of shame that made him ache all the harder for her.

She slams her forearm against his neck, choking the air out of him. And Jaime -- Jaime with his hands already tied, already subdued beneath her -- tilts his neck back further, an animalistic gesture, a signal of submission. Even with the restraints, he could have at least struggled -- but he just leans back on the bed, eyes closed and lips parted, the only resistance shown in the almost imperceptible curl of his lips, the clench of his teeth outlined in the sharp slope of his jaw.

He bucks his hips up into her, a silent plea for her to fuck him faster. Instead she slows, bearing down with all her strength, crushing his throat beneath her arm. His moans come out in small strangled grunts, cut-off gasps for air, and Cersei comes hard above him, the world lost in a wave of his desire parsed like some pinned butterfly beneath her grasp.

Those days are gone, she thinks, when he finds her again in the dark of her chambers. If there's a look in his eyes now like an animal about to roll over, it is not at her behest. He tells her of Father disowning him, and she takes his maimed arm between her hands as she listens, doesn't move her fingers lower than the dip in his elbow. He winces so hard at the touch that she can almost feel it, a lance through her own gut. His tiredness is a heavy burden in her bones.

Jaime had been infallible, untouchable, her shield against the world. He seems shrunken, now, diminished, in the dark of the room. The shadows hang low over his cheekbones, falling over the nearly unrecognizable sculpture of his face. She had not thought they could tear him down, had not thought there was space for such nothingness inside of him, too. But they have carved from him a lack, have hollowed something out from his insides. Perhaps he will wear it as well, that smile of blood and emptiness, the one from all her nightmares. The thought leaves her feeling cold.

His good hand is in her hair, too gentle by degrees. She ignores the other, or rather the lack, focused instead on slipping hers inside his breeches. That, at least, is familiar; he is warm and hard, slick against her palm. She strokes him in quick, sure movements, and when he moves to kiss her she shies away, biting at his neck instead. She listens to him growl, voice caught low as he comes, spilling himself across her fist.

He will not avenge her son, she realizes, like a sinking stone in a well, even before he rejects her in the White Tower. And besides, vengeance does nothing, doesn't even warm a bed in the night. _Revenge_ is just a word men throw like a sword when they've got nothing left between their fingers. When they don't even have fingers left to hold onto their promises? That's a different sort of impotence, Cersei supposes.

She used to pray to the Warrior, when she was small and stupid. She's grown and stupid now, and all her prayers have turned to rot. She turns in the dark, alone, feeling the stickiness of her twin's seed dried between her fingers. They have not shared a bed until morning for years.

Tonight she dreams of sons and daughters they will never have.

There is nothing closer to a person than being inside them. She and Jaime were that, once, long ago. As far back as memory goes, there is herself, and her twin, and then only darkness. But even in the dark she can find him, a body against hers, warm skin pressed to her own. Some nights she can still feel that darkness, can hear it harkening them back, a cacophony of sound like locusts calling out on aching summer nights against a blood-red moon. Wrapped in each other's arms, the outline of his lips are a ghosted echo against her own. The touch is hair-raising yet familiar -- something safe, something ancient, something sleeping like poison forgotten in their veins.

This is womb, is regression, is catharsis the long way down. Without it she is incomplete, as she told him; but now, even with him inside her, she feels it calling out. It is calling her back, a looming nothingness threatening to swallow them both whole. She wants Jaime the way she wants to smash the world to glass shards, to tear the throats out of ghosts and raise the dead just to slaughter them again, to burn the world down and build another in its ashen wake. But instead she just has new nightmares, of empty thrones and emptier wombs, of arms with no hands attached, of dismembered fingers reaching out for nothing in the dark.


End file.
